Fighter for addicts ready to quit

Source: The Tyee

Ann Livingston of VANDU is wearied by death.
By Sarah Ripplinger
Published: December 13, 2007

After spending the past 13 years trying to save Vancouver's poor from the filthy alleys of the Downtown Eastside, Ann Livingston doesn't have a pension plan or any significant savings, but she has decided to quit her job.

Livingston, a star of the widely shown documentary Fix [video available in the library], has spent the last nine years co-ordinating the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), a non-profit operated by addicts. She's done a lot to help drug users get their voices heard. But she says she is tired of Vancouver's hypocrisy. While the host of the 2010 Olympics is termed the world's "most liveable city" by The Economist magazine, its poorest neighbourhood grapples with an epidemic of HIV/AIDS comparable to Botswana's.

After devoting more than a decade of her life helping people in the Downtown Eastside, Livingston says she hasn't noticed improvements in living conditions or a decrease in the demand for aid. In fact, she says, things just seem to be getting worse.

"Yeah, people did change, but then they died," Livingston remembers thinking to herself last spring. "I started to realize, I do leadership development with people who are very likely to die and there's more dead people now that I've worked with than live people." (...)

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